The “Internet of Everything” (IoE) is the most hyped “emerging technology” today and represents a huge opportunity for a new breed of criminals (“Hackers”) who use the computer to attack their victims by forcing their way (disrupting communications, altering access or issuing false commands/data) into our Critical Infrastructure segments, businesses, healthcare, educational facilities, governments and our personal lives. This makes protecting these facilities and their associated electronic based assets (digital computers) from electronic attack vitally important. Unfortunately, traditional security efforts for such facilities and electronic assets have resulted in only protecting the entity from the curious rather than from determined Intruders. Making matters worse, a more sophisticated and capable class of Intruder has emerged and protection of these facilities and their electronic assets requires a different approach and level of protection.
Protecting a facility and its electronic based assets is a time consuming and never ending effort. New attacks are developed regularly and the attacker generally has the edge. In computer and network security situations the security professionals attempt to protect all portions of the network from attack. Starting with the network perimeter, the defender tries to prevent network intrusion and then breaks the network into defendable chunks. Specific attack vectors, such as malware, viruses, and spoofing are addressed. The final result is an integrated and coordinated defensive perimeter and systematic approach that discourages and turns back attacks and is similar to the military concept of setting up a secure perimeter which consists of three general steps for “keeping the bad guys out” physically, electronically, and organizationally:                (1) Keep the bad guys out (of your physical perimeter)—Protect your perimeter from external intrusion. Physical access is often the easiest and most effective way to penetrate an organization. Hackers use this approach because physical access means “owning” the equipment. If the equipment cannot be taken over, it can be damaged or stolen, often with the same result and without the effort required to create, test, debug, and run an electronic hack.        (2) Keep the bad guys out (of your electronic perimeter)—Protect your electronic perimeter from intrusion. Electronic access allows information theft from a remote location and is typically a second step if physical access is denied or is impractical.        (3) Keep the bad guys out (of your organization)—Protect your organization. Scrutiny and constant evaluation of personnel inside the organization is required to ensure that the organization has not been infiltrated or that a worker has not been convinced to attack from the inside.        
Hackers have gotten more sophisticated and capable over the years and have developed many methods of attack for penetrating the physical perimeter and the electronic perimeter defenses and once inside, obtaining the information being protected. This has led to the ever increasing use of data/information encryption techniques which make the information hard, if not impossible, for a hacker to read. This is done via cryptography by using encryption algorithms and a secret “key”, one that is hard to guess to ensure secrecy that is shared by those people who are legitimate parties to the data. “Conventional Wisdom” in cryptography says that modern ciphers, like AES, have large combinatoric key spaces, so that extensive effort, usually in the form of a “Brute Force” attack, is expended and it is statistically improbable to break the cipher in a “reasonable time.” But messages encrypted using these ciphers have been, and are, readily broken because the solution space is not as large as previously thought due to the existence of equivalent keys that give rise to “isomorphs”, repetition and language patterns and/or the ciphers are susceptible to heuristic attacks.
Clearly, keeping the bad guys out of the physical perimeter of a network, the electronic perimeter of a network, including the devices themselves, and securing the data within the network through the use of various obscuring techniques are top priorities in today's modern world of ever increasing computing power and sophistication.
The present invention is directed at improving protection for the electronic perimeter of a computing environment, starting with a single node computing device and extending to the point of connection to an external network.